Google, the phone company?
For years, the mobile phone carriers have been adding text services to their core voice offering. Google is doing just the opposite, adding voice services to its core text offering, while moving aggressively into the mobile phone space. The New York Times described Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Apple’
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While none of this makes Google a telephone company in the traditional sense, the gap is narrowing. Last year Apple removed Google Voice from the iPhone Store. Now, the service is back on the iPhone, and elsewhere, as a mobile Web application. As with Skype on mobile phones, the service opens the door to callers placing inexpensive VoIP calls over 3G networks?a potential problem for AT&T, the iPhone’
Goodies for developers: Web standards, APIs, and more
The software engineers at Google have dedicated a lot of effort to reaching out to their counterparts in the broader developer community. The company is helping drive open standards and has extended many of its services via APIs. Google also hosts both open source projects and, occasionally, developer conferences.
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For Apple, the Flash plug-in is a no-fly zone. “At its worldwide developer conference in Los Angeles, Adobe said it would be releasing Flash for mobile platforms including Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm’
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Google has reinforced its HTML5 support by sounding the death knell for Google Gears applications. In a February 19 blog post entitled “Hello HTML5,” Ian Fette of the Gears team wrote that the company is looking for ways to translate all of its Gears capabilities into Web standards, including HTML5, as well as “new APIs like Local Storage and Web Sockets,” both of which are now included in the Chrome browser. Other facets of Gears, such as the LocalServer API and Geolocation, are also represented by similar APIs in new standards and will be included in Google Chrome shortly.”
In addition to Web standards, Google is promoting other technologies for third-party developers:
- Google Web Toolkit (GWT):
- An open source toolkit for building Web applications, developed browser-based applications, without the developer having to master browser incompatibilities, or AJAX-related technologies like XMLHttpRequest and JavaScript. GWT includes an SDK with compiler and Java libraries that allow developers to write client-side applications in Java, and then deploy them as JavaScript, as well as a Chrome extension for pinpointing performance bottlenecks and a plug-in for the Eclipse development framework. Google says it has used GWT for its Google Wave collaboration software and Google AdWords advertising program, among others, and claims GWT is also used by “thousands of developers around the world.”
- APIs:
- For website developers, Google APIs have become ambassadors-at-large for Google services. These are AJAX APIs for all occasions written to let you implement rich, dynamic web sites entirely in JavaScript and HTML. A few lines of JavaScript code will add Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Translate, Google Book Search, and other services. Developers should expect more of the same.
- Open source developer resources:
- Google claims to have released more than 500 projects comprising more than 15 million lines of code. The company offers free project hosting, including storage space, version control, wiki pages for documentation, and a search facility for finding current hosted projects.
Google also reaches out to developers in person. The company’